Belief in God is scientific, East meets West, and....(#7)
They share some things because human beings are religious creatures and always have been for as long as there have been human beings, them hard-wired to be so, made this way, and which begs the question of how and why should this be? As far as we can tell at this time, it is a unique trait of humanity, the search for the answers to the big question of WHY? or even WHY ASK WHY? It is difficult to see any evolutionary advantage, or pressure to survive, leading to such an anomoly arising in humanity....unless, of course, religion actually worked as advertised. The search leads inevitably to an interior search as to our own nature and its relation to what appears to be the exterior, and will undoubtedly share as a species certain discoveries and experiences.
Now, I will throw out a series of likely unrelated questions and statements as food for thought...I promise they will all lead somewhere eventually...at least, it is so hoped.
Firstly, since this blog is being read by modern Western children of the "Enlightenment" with its "scientific" dismissal of religion as a prop for the mentally challenged (or those with no mental activity at all), there might be one, or many, proud card-carrying militant atheists among possible readers, ever so self-congratulatory of their lack of superstitious religion and champing at the bit to crush the impediment of religious superstition to scientific progress. I will congratulate them as being members of THE most blinkered, un-scientific, closed-minded religion in the history of humanity, "The Church Of Atheism", and hence the most fanatical and possibly dangerous religion in all of history. Consider what the scientific method IS.......consider that the greatest minds in all of Western history, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas have considered the question of God, and have, with excruciating logic, shown logical "proofs" of the necessity of the existence of God by whatever name. Now, an atheist is free to argue against these proofs, but the very best they can do (and generally do NOT do) is fight to a draw, a tie. Nor can any atheist scientifically prove, in a laboratory or any other experimental setting, the non-existence of God....which leaves the militant atheist holding the dreaded position once described by my philosophy department chairman as, "There are two types of opinions which you might hold, those being opinions which you are entitled to hold, and those opinions which you are NOT entitled to hold." Past all of that, and lacking any experimental data to support the claim of no-God, the atheist accepts this belief as an article of faith, it a belief in things beyond the observable or supportable. In case that does not ring a bell, we are talking here of a religion, folks. As for a dangerous fanatical movement, one need only look around today to see who is attempting to suppress whom, them "knowing better" despite a belief system that is utter paradox, "The Church of No-church". There is a psychological term for those who attempt to live a paradox, and it is not nice. Yet, they see themselves as qualified to run things, that everyone else is the deluded one, and it is all the religionists who are out to get them and throw the entire world back to the dark ages (what ever THOSE are supposed to be).....uhh...right you are, squire...quite right (blast! why is there never a huggy jacket handy when you need one?).
Spinning off on an entirely different tangent, let us consider briefly the nature of the observable universe from microscopic to macroscopic, from the sub-atomic to the cosmological, micro-cosm to macro-cosm, and use the latest science for this look. At its deepest level, the modern scientific mind believes (in all modesty, of course) that the human mind, alone, or more likely in concert with other human minds, and today aided by artificial/man-made minds/computers, is/are capable of eventually comprehending the universe from its smallest constituent to its largest, and from that comprehension, will one day be able to manipulate it in every respect to the advantage of themselves and/or humanity. They believe in its order, that it ultimately IS comprehensible through science and mathematics, and that, by cracky, we are going to do this thing.
Now, a brief time-out to examine the limitations of the scientific method, which is that of inductive logic (as opposed to deductive logic) in developing its models/ideas as to the nature of things and how things work. It says, "all the rocks I have dropped have fallen, all the rocks my friends have dropped have fallen, therefore, all rocks when dropped will fall." Unfortunately, this is a very weak way of "knowing" anything at all, and is as absurd as the examples of, "all the fish I have seen have fins, all the fish my friends have seen have fins, therefore all fish have fins", or those commonly used in contemporary American society such as the false conclusions reached regarding white men who own guns or black men who play basketball.
Back to applying the scientific method from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, a key constituent of doing this is via the use of advanced higher mathematics, where incredibly intricate and complex mathematical formula/programs are used to model/describe/predict reality. Whereupon, it is time for yet another quick question....that being, has anybody bothered to ask exactly why and how the universe is comprehensible at all via the utterly artificial/manmade complex symbolic logic which is mathematics, or even why it is comprehensible at all to man or even logical, when clearly it did not need be that way at all, especially the human mathematics part? It actually seems unlikely.
It should then be no suprise to discover that modern science shows a far stranger reality than seems on the surface of things. At the sub-atomic level, reality has no meaning at all in the common way of looking at things. It appears that solid objects are composed only of small packets of probability having only a tendency to exist or not exist, first here, and then there, steered by mysterious fields of energy in an interlinked web of existence and interdependence, where a positive bit of matter flying into a negative bit of matter resulting in annihilation and release of energy is also the same thing as a positive bit of matter flying forward in time and then suddenly/instantaneously reversing itself to go backwards in time while releasing prodigious amounts of energy. And this is of what all solid matter is "made", mostly emptiness with whizzing about small things which have a tendency to be or not to be, where we can only observe the speed or the mass of something, but never both at the same time, and where if you bring that something to a complete rest then its actual position becomes a complete ambiguity rather than complete certainty. This is not quite the mathematical clockwork world which science believed existed when it started on its hunt.
Things get no better at the macro-cosmic/cosmological end of the spectrum, where gravity creates dimples or whacking deep wells or maybe even holes in the fabric of "empty" space, while space can be curved, and passage of time changes in relation to an object's approach toward the speed of light, and again everything tied together by mysterious forces in webs of interlinked interdependence. Then we have from where it all came, including such as the concept of a "singularity" which suddenly was, and which, for reasons unknown, decided to rapidly expand (the Big Bang) into becoming all which is, and happily for us created time and space along the way. I have always enjoyed watching astro-physicists in interviews even with very liberal and modern scientific minded interviewers such as at NPR where they ask the expert, "Yes, but where did THAT come from?", which is invariably followed by one of two responses, one being that the question has no meaning at this rarefied level, and the other response being officious throat clearing followed by hemming and hawing. Meanwhile, nine out of ten of these folk seem to be declared atheists.
This is all mentioned because it all was a giant SUPRISE!!! to science as they made these discoveries, which is not exactly what science claimed would happen when science pushed for ascendency, where it promised an ever more predictable (and manipulable) world and where enthusiasts 120yrs ago were about convinced that we were on the verge of knowing everything and solving all "problems". This attitude remains even more entrenched today and is gaining to a majority even in the general population.
This is all compliments of a very consciously pushed myth of scientific advancement at every level of society and education which borders upon, or exceeds, the level of propaganda... the myth that science is some monumental edifice (probably shaped like an upward pointing pyramid as suitable for myth and Lodges) where each generation is building painstakingly upon "all which came before" until we reach the pinnacle of knowledge (which always is just around the corner as becoming of pyramid pinnacles). This myth was thoroughly demolished back in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where you may not have heard of that book, but you almost surely are aware of his famous phrase from that work, the ever-popular-today "paradigm shift" favorite phrase of the management class right before something often really ugly, and always really expensive, happens. Kuhn rightly observed that what really happens is succeeding generations have a BIG IDEA which spontaneously disassembles what came before, and that each "advance" is in fact a very violent revolution as the old (and its adherents) are tossed out, and, in with the new. This explains the modern shortage of alchemists, blood-letters to adjust bodily humours, cosmic spore nurseries, and those specializing in ether management in radio engineering positions, as well as the woefully slow sales of planetary atomic models at toy stores.
Not one bit of the above writing is an attack on science as science, since science is a VERY useful tool. With science, one can do very useful things or very destructive things, much as with a hammer... the difference being I have yet to see a carpenter hold up a hammer and declare that within it are the answers to all things and problems while declaring all other tools are worthless. Science is a very worthwhile tool, but it has limitations and, same as a hammer, it makes a lousy saw and makes an even worse literary or religious work, or especially a religion, period.
Meanwhile, remember that utter bizarreness of things at the micro-cosmic and macro-cosmic? Directly plumbing the depths of reality in the interior life, mystics across the ages have been describing exactly such a reality of interwoven transient/yet-eternal interdependence and they would not have been suprised at all at the discoveries of modern science. Do you perhaps doubt that assertion? There is a very latest contentious "thing" in theoretical physics postulating the multi-verse of endless possibilities/dimensions coexisting in space and time. Meanwhile, we have the ancient Judeo-Christian concept of the great I AM THAT I AM God who exists in one eternal Now containing all times, past, present and future and all possiblities. The main difference being the scientist can only map such a thing as an outsider looking in, while the mystic directly experiences such a reality. The next blog entry will discuss two works, one a very nifty comparison between views of reality held by (Eastern, but same goes for Western) mystics and modern science, and the other work will be a Westerner's inside view of his experience in moving to Japan to take up Zen Buddhism and what he found.
(above photo compliments of Jason Strull at Unsplash.com)
